The foster care system has likely taken twice as many children from parents as it says it has, according to experts.
“Parents had essentially been railroaded into sending their kids out of their home without due process in the courts,” Michael Ramey, executive director of the Parental Rights Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
This “hidden foster care” system uses a series of threats, pressure, and manipulations to separate parents from their children and give them to friends or relatives, Mr. Ramey said.
“If the parents will ‘voluntarily’ send their kids to live with someone else, usually kin or maybe a close friend, then they won’t be taken into foster care,” Mr. Ramey said. “Because it doesn’t go before a judge, there’s no oversight. There’s no due process.”
On July 19, Mr. Ramey and about 30 parental rights and family defense lawyers, activists, and organizations made 28 visits to members of Congress asking them to create a bill to start monitoring the hidden foster care system.
The group’s efforts in Washington resulted in an unnamed Republican senator’s announcing a “tentative interest in being the lead Senate sponsor” of the bill, the press release added.
Many parents feel terror at the threat of losing a child, Mr. Ramey said. And U.S. child protective services find endless ways to take children away, he said.
“There are so many horror stories,” he said. “A lot of times, parents don’t know where their children are.”
Government agents have taken away children because parents are poor, because children are sick, or because parents have let children play alone at the park across the street, Mr. Ramsey said.
Taking Children Away
To illustrate, he told a personal story. Mr. Ramey said his wife has suffered from several illnesses, and to help her get well, he has taken her to multiple doctors.Doing the same thing for his child could get him investigated for Munchausen syndrome by proxy, he said. People with Munchausen syndrome fake or create health problems for attention.
“Between husband and wife, that’s just love. And it’s the same for parents and children. Love compels us to want answers for our sick kids so we can get them healthy again,” Mr. Ramey said.
“A half-educated medical professional can look at this and decide, ‘Oh no! This parent is seeking too much care for their child.”
Most cases of abuse reported to child protective services aren’t actually abuse, Mr. Ramey said.
“A large percentage of child abuse investigations, 5 out of 6, come back as unfounded or unsubstantiated,” he said. “Of the ones that are substantiated by the courts, the majority are for allegations of neglect, with the cases of abuse or sexual abuse combined making up maybe as many as 15 percent of the cases.”
The children removed by these cases enter a foster care system characterized by its distance from parents, poor management, and abuse, Mr. Ramey said.
“Many parents would surrender their right arm, let alone a right to due process, if they think it will protect their children from going to live with strangers,” he said.
The only contact children in the foster care system get with their parents is a one-hour phone call every week.
About 40 percent of foster children experience sexual abuse, according to research from Brigham Young University.
The foster care system loses track of 20,000 children yearly, statistics from the child protection activist group Gen Justice show.
About 391,000 children are in the foster care system today, according to government statistics.
Accountability Required
“You’re talking about putting children at great risk with strangers, in a system that is notorious for losing track of children, over something that could have been corrected in their home,” Mr. Ramey said.The problems with the current foster care system are so severe that authorities should only use it as a last resort, he said.
“We’re told a lot of localities use this in low-threat cases where the children aren’t in great danger, which raises the question, ‘Should the children have been taken from their families in the first place?’” he said.
Despite the power the hidden foster care system holds, there are few state statistics on it, Mr. Ramey said.
“We need to ask the departments to turn in their homework. We want to know what they’re doing. We need to ask why families are being separated,” Mr. Ramey said.
Current estimates on the hidden foster care system come from the few states that track the children removed to the homes of friends or relatives, Mr. Ramey said.
Between seven and 10 children go to the hidden foster care system for every 10 children who go to the normal system, Mr. Ramey said.
“There used to be this assumption that if a family was being investigated for child abuse or neglect, they must be a bad family. But I think more and more people are beginning to understand that all kinds of families fall under investigation,” he said.
